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Nightmare Week has rolled well into a second week. The trigger this time....I can't write about it directly, because what more is there to write about it after so many years??? So we will do what writers are best at - we will circle the issue, fortify it with words, drown it with words, and see if it helps.

The question isn't "Do you want to write about this?" The question is "How deep do you want to go?"

And the truth is...not very deep. How many more years can I write about the same thing, saying the same things? Decades, paragraphs, prose and badly writ days, rolling over into nights and weeks where I wake up screaming, again. And again. And again.

For over 25 years now.

I am tired of writing about them. How many more times can I say they are insane? How many more ways can I tell myself that I am strong for having escaped, how many more words can others use to say that I am strong for it? How many more nightmares from just hearing about it do I have to log before the Universe deems I am done with it?

How long do I have to be strong before it is finally over? How long do I have to be separated from it, away from it, before it finally, finally assimilates and my mind no longer finds significance enough to dream about it?

When will I stop being afraid of them, even if that fear is buried so deep that it only comes out in my dreams? When will my terror be considered paid in full?

When will it be enough?

The answer is "When it is enough." And that is not now. As I woke up twice screaming last night, it is not now. I spill nightmares that were shoved into my chest by other hands for 25 years now and it is still not enough.

Vindication is so hollow. I didn't want this, no matter how much I thought I wanted it in my youth. This entry is hollow - I write about how tired I am of it rather than writing the words that sparked the nightmares, hoping it will be enough.

It won't be. But maybe it will be enough to let me sleep tonight. That's all I want.

I am stuck at 17 years old, pausing at the door of the home I ran away from forever. I am trying to consider all of the consequences of going for a walk and never walking back through this door. I'm too addled from abuse and arguments, though, and my feet begin to move before I have time to change my mind.

But I'd spent months trying to consider the consequences, of which there were two: Cassie and my kid brother, aged 15 and 5. The consequences of leaving them behind, alone to be abused, without me there to try and tell them how wrong what was happening was.

By the time I made that final pause, though, there was only one thing I could do. I could save myself and hope that someday, five years from then, ten years, twenty years later, I could save them, too.

Twenty years later, I am still considering the consequences of leaving home. I have not saved anyone, as eventually I realized we can only save ourselves. And leaving them at home did have consequences - with one kid gone, my mother and stepfather could laser focus on abusing the other two children remaining.

And abuse them they did. So much worse than what they did to me.

I know I made the right call for myself. But the survivor's guilt still has the ability to leap up and begin tearing at my throat. It's rare that it crosses my eyes, that I can see it at all anymore. But it still does run through my blood. I suppose on some level, it always will.

I'm still not - and likely never will be - convinced that I made the right move for them.

And what I'm feeling this morning, 35 years old paused in a doorway at 17 years old, is that it was not fair to have to consider those sorts of consequences. To save myself or try and stay and save everyone else...and now being old enough to where my siblings can tell me what happened to them after I left....things that I could have directed at myself instead of being inflicted on my siblings...

Survivor's guilt is an absolutely normal thing to feel in these circumstances. But it was certainly not fair that I had to make that decision.

I've slept long enough where my body can no longer stay prone, but my mind is soup. I suppose that's not such a bad place to be. It means the energy needed to indulge in self-destruction is not there.

The utterly, overwhelmingly depressed and the furious, raging out of my mind places - those are the two states I am safest to myself in.

It means not living a life, but it might mean saving mine, if only for one more day.

More bad news about my mother, who is insane and disconnecting completely from reality in a rage-fueled state of threats and vile blame on anyone who comes near her. EXCEPT, of course, when medical staff is in the room, in which case she is an angel.

I told Cassie to use her phone to record it when she loses her shit. And if she can get her involuntarily committed, my mother won't be able to hold it together for long. She'll lose it and it will all be on record.

I'm too tired to get into more right now, except to say this:

It took 25 years for the tipping point to become piled upon enough to fall over. And I told them 25 years ago this would happen. I saw things no one else saw and I told them where those things would lead.

Every notice how it's only adults who say things like "For once, I'd like to be wrong."

It's more like a line of dominoes. Who or what set up the long, twisting curl of pieces, I don't know, but all it took was the slightest flick of a fingernail to bring the entire empire crashing down. Even at 17, writing in my journals, I predicted this. It wasn't hard to see where the stacks were too close to each other. It wasn't hard to see where they would smash into one another to bring the next piece down, over and over again.

What I hadn't predicted was that my mother would become her own greatest victim, trapped even further by those surrounding her. It might give her a better chance of surviving should she divorce her husband, but it would not solve her problems. It'd be like a junkie throwing out all of her needles - a good start, but only a precursor to starting the work on what made her want to shoot up to begin with.

My mother is 89 pounds, a thing that miraculously doesn't seem to worry the medical practitioners in the hospital. This is in part her eating disorder having re-emerged, and largely more the fact that her husband feeds her only when HE feels like putting in the effort to feed her. She is otherwise generally bed-bound, rising only in the throes of mania (bizarrely yet diagnosed, but blindingly apparent to anyone who see it.) She babbles maniacally, half the time acting half her age or younger, the same as HER mother did when in the later developed stages of schizophrenia.

Jim, her husband, puts her in the room of the house where the black mold literally rises along the corners of the wall, while he sleeps in the cleanest room of the house. He put off taking her to the hospital while she was having a stroke because there was a pig needing to be skinned beforehand. (Not a euphemism. He's a hunter.) He steals her medication, her disability checks. He refuses to discuss areas of my mother's physical health (such as her pancreas) which has been slowly killing her for years at this point.

But then, this is the same man who handed her a shotgun and told her that if she hated him that much, why not shoot him? She fled the house in terror, only to have him laugh in her face when she returned. "What, did you think I was stupid enough to give you a loaded gun?" he chortled.

He LOVES to makes threats with his guns. I remember this even as early as 16, when he would pull them all out, lay them on a table, and ask Cassie and I our opinion on which he should use to kill himself.

(I should have pointed to the rifle and said I'd use the others myself just to make sure he was actually dead.)

This is the man who tore the head off of a living pigeon in front of Cassie's young son to teach him about "life and death." This is the man that had my mother so worried that she asked Cassie to go through his computer, to find he has a ton of....well, really, REALLY illegal shit on it. Illegal of the worst kind.

And this the man my mother knew all along was like this. My mother chose him over her children (and that's a QUOTE from her, no less) because she was afraid of being alone. She made that choice, knowing full well what he had done to us.

I'm not sure if ever thought that those behaviors would eventually be turned towards her once we were out of the picture. That's the tragic part. Some part of her has been overturned within the last months, and she has been able to apologize - or at least mouth the words - of apologies for staying with such a monster.

But an apology is not a change, nor would it be enough for reconciliation. Some ships have long since sailed and there is no return.

But it does make me sad. Sadness without the anger, which dropped away the first time I nearly died, seemingly out of the blue. Sorrow at the holes a person can dig themselves into.

But the hole she's dug for herself isn't a hole. It's a grave. It is a grave and Jim stands above it, continually throwing down more shovels so that she can dig her final resting place deeper and deeper.

Cassie says that she is now, for the first time in her life, disclosing the most basic of abuses she suffered herself as a child. Another good start, but in name only, as my mother refuses therapy of any kind. What my mother did to us was horrific, what HER mother and grandparents did to her was monstrous, and god only knows what THEIR parents did to them.

It is no small task to recover from your own childhood abuse - and it may be the only thing that could save her. I don't think she is capable of saving herself, so plentiful are the steel strings that Jim has her in, twitching her as his own puppeteer. Even without him, she's spent almost 56 years running away from what was done to her.

I told Jesse it would take a miracle to save her....and I do not believe in miracles.

I remember at 15 she had told me about her grandfather sexually abusing her. She was driving me to school. I glanced out of the window and told her that he had been wrong to do that. That he abused her, a child, and he should not have done that.

"You can't say what he did was bad. He is dead and can't defend himself anymore," was her response. She dropped me off at the school curb, where I made a beeline for the bathroom and spent the first two hours of class sobbing in the toilet stall.

How do you break past that kind of denial? Where someone refuses to label sexual abuse as wrong simply because the perpetrator is dead?

You can't. It took me years of trying otherwise, but I eventually learned you cannot make even a dent into that kind of denial. And that, the denial and the people she's chosen to keep close enough to CONFIRM that denial for her, is what is going to kill her.

If Jim doesn't get to her outright, at least. She's chosen a long, painful, suicide of the body and soul, and a husband who has no problem hastening both her choices of death.

I sometimes don't know what would be the greater mercy - his death or hers.

A call from Cassie. My mother is not doing well. Far too much to go into right now. I am settling it all, letting the sorrow sift through the barricades I have spent the last 15 years walling her inside of.

We'll be a perfect family.When you walk away is when we really play...

Please don't let them look through the curtains.

No one ever listens, this wallpaper glistensDon't let them see what goes down in the kitchen.

I am. I escaped 20 years ago, the first one to run away, the first one to save myself. But 20 years is only time, not a wall, and what's percolating feels an ocean rising against the turrets. More will come as I figure out more of what I am feeling.

I do know one thing, though. I want him dead. She chose her path long ago and he has done everything to ensure she stays on that path.

If I knew a blood-ritual for murder, my stepfather would be dead by morning.

I gave my father the link to my LJ. It is a gift from me beyond compare. It took well over 10 years before I trusted Cassie to this. And no other family member has ever been given the offer to read this. (My mom somehow stumbled onto it, but given the choice, I would never have allowed her to see it.)

It makes fair enough sense that as he is now a stabilizing force in my life, that he deserves this. It is also the fastest way to check in on me. I told him today that I would be nothing short of honored if he were to read up on at least the last twenty or posts or so.

He got sober at 60, an age where most people give into their demons permanently. Against all odds, he somehow found the will to change. And it gave him this serenity that I never thought he would find.

I've told him he a single most inspiration in my life. It is never too late to turn the tides.

It's funny, for all the years he beat the hell out of me as a child, it turns out once you remove the alcohol, a very decent man lay underneath. He was just a mean drunk.

I warned him that my journal is raw, often ridiculous, and filled with dark places. He seemed to understand that, given the circumstances.

For the first time in my life, I trust him. He will not use these words against me. He will not read my words and run off on some wildly out of based (if not well intention) advice. I think he will be able to accept my feelings and react appropriate to them.

For the first time in my life, I feel safe about sharing what is the color and makeup of what makes me ME. That has to count for something.

My brain decided to wrap three of its favorite nightmare themes into one dream last night. My mother, my stepdad, AND dead cats. And as I sat outside for my first morning cigarette, trying to shake away the tears and nausea, I realized something.

That was harder.

It took two years to get away from them and another 20 years to get over them. I was so young. I was only 15 at the start of it. I had no idea what I was doing, only knew the desperation of having to get away from them.

And I eventually did just that. Did it at an incredibly young age, fighting them, calling a million agencies trying to raise the red flags, joining the courts against the only parents I had truly known at that age. I did all that.

I cannot run away from lupus. There are no red flags to be waived, no armies of social workers I can raise and stand with. Lupus is buried deep within my DNA. There is no hope of separating my body from this disease.

But getting away from them...that was harder. Healing from them....that was harder. It, however, gave me a roadmap. Faded, dusty from lack of use as it is, I know the path to freedom.

And I've decided to use it. Though it may take another two years of desperate struggle to remove myself from this immediate crisis, and another twenty years to accept this crisis, I will do it.

I will be angry. I will be overcome with sorrow. I will lose entire days, weeks, months to the fight, just as I did 22 years ago. But goddamnit, it was a fight well worth it.

Gonzo, thank you so much for posting what you did about the Propoxophene. When I read about how the effective and lethal dose were too close, I tossed that shit right away. Of all things, I can't overdo the Tylenol. Even the few of those pills I took shredded my stomach lining, which is a sign of an overdose impending.

They were also causing nightmares. And a class book, textbook definition of a night terror. The kind with awareness while paralyzed and the visual of seeing something pinning you down. It was a hell of a panic attack. I am no stranger to nightmares, but rarely experience night terrors themselves.

So between all that, I'm not using those pills anymore. Thank you for informing me of what the drug was actually composed of. I might have done some real damage to my kidneys without knowing that.

Another new symptom: Pain, or really an ache of the sharpest and heaviest kind, in my right arm. From shoulder to wrist, making the entire arm completely useless. It woke me up at 4:30 this morning. Too early for my tastes, but after some Tylenol, my last Hydro, and a heating pad, I can at least use the arm.

I will bring it up to my GP when I see her tomorrow.

I was bitching to Jesse about my nightmares. It was like, OKAY BRAIN, I get it. We're cracked. We've got lots of new trauma to process along with bits and pieces of old trauma. We've got a lot going on during waking hours, so you're trying to be nice and process it while I'm asleep.

But jesus, it doesn't do any good if it destroys the good sleep I DO get. I said to Jesse "My brain has its very own Guantanamo Bay built inside it." So where do I get it ratified that torture is illegal? How do I get my brain to compose its own Geneva Convention?

I thought the dreams would get less gory as I got older. They haven't. They've stayed the same gory they've always been. They HAVE reduced in frequency, now going months without nightmares instead of just a couple of weeks. But that week of nightmares that I DO experience, as it's always about a week's worth, fucks me up good and crazy every time.

For whatever reason, my mother has been on mind for the last few days. I was watching the movie "Fried Green Tomatoes" yesterday, a favorite of her films. I realized that while I have long since removed from my life, I still like the movies she liked and still like the music she liked. Our ages vs our major life events have also run along the same lines.

We both are terrible cooks and have always dated men who cook. We both got divorced at the same age. And while for completely different reasons, we both lost our minds at the same age. (35 years old.) It's never been confirmed but Cassie and I have both long suspected she has untreated bipolar disorder. I am now wondering if she had lupus, which can make for all kinds of crazy, and just never got it treated. (Her hatred of therapists is only a few degrees higher than her hatred of doctors.)

Not that it rationalizes or excuses any of what she's done. She made her own choice to refuse therapeutic help, over and over again, for her own abused childhood. She made her own choice to stay addicted to drugs for the last 30 or so years. And she made her own choice to stay married to a man that she knew, she KNEW, was abusing her children.

No amount of crazy, mental or physical, makes up for that one.

But it also makes me wonder what other factors were in play - and how many more we have to share as we both get older. It's hard to break the cycle when you don't know everything about what composes the cycle. I guess the point is that as I see the destructive ones, those are the ones I bend until they snap. That means at least in my little life, those are ones I do not have to repeat.

So here's to breaking cycles, which will hopefully soon include the breaking the cycle of my unending uptick in blood pressure readings. That would be AWESOME.

"Jimmie, what your father did does not reflect on you. It never will. You are not him. His sins are not yours."

"I don't want to kill Jim. I want him to get his karma alive. Then he can die and become a tree. Everyone's recyclable."

"They have 35 guns in their house."

"She was a child, mom. What's with the Teressa hate parade? What good did burning all her stuff do? She was just a kid."

And for the first time in years, I feel sorrow for my mother. Not pity. Not quiet disgust. Sorrow. This is where she put herself. This is where she will keep herself. Is there ever anyone too far gone? I don't know. Her case seems a good one to argue that some people do, indeed, slide too deep into the abyss to ever claw back out of.

Cassie is back, healthy, wise, clean. And full of things that I knew, in my heart, in my head, simply through history and practice, that still shocked me when I heard it.

The first quote my mother told Cassie in a brief moment of lucidity. She tried to get off her methadone, had 48 hours of clarity, before Jim forced her to take the drugs again. Cassie did not react well, furious that our mother knew the whole time, ripped apart by the level of cowardice that my mother is awash with. This is what finally caused her to cut them out.

The second quote is what I wish to tell my kid brother, who has cut out Cassie and I due to these accusations, no matter how many times his father tries to kill his mother. I can understand his rage. He cannot understand my compassion.

The rest? Things Cassie said. I knew these things, as we all know these things after all these years talking about them. Even if I didn't KNOW these things, I knew these things.

I am overwhelmed by what I didn't know I knew.

All that anger I felt towards Cassie? Gone. Melted away. I guess I shouldn't say "melted away." It's been over two years since we've talked. I've worked it out, though I still worry about pitfalls. But the rage and resentment?

Maybe being sick made me realize that feeling all that towards her, carrying it for her, just made me sicker. All I feel is gratitude that she is back and she is better.

She wanted to hear the emo music I've been listening to. I guess as a way to connect. I didn't want to share that. It's mostly two Icon For Hire songs. One's an anthem about the strength to not cut. Another asks herself who she will be when she gets well.

Did I choose cutting as a way to sabotage all of the positive letting go and becoming a better person that I'd spent weeks thinking about, because of becoming so sick? Was that even a little part of it? Or am I thinking too hard about it?

Did I sabotage myself at all, or was it a slip? Why is what it was important? I haven't felt the need to cut since. Why can't I just put it up as something I did out of desperation and let it go?

My mother always knew. I knew this. I just didn't know this.

Xanax makes me jumps subjects. Or else there's just so much to write.

There's always so much to write. I could write for 30 years straight, not a sip of water, not a bite of food, and still not get it all down. I find this maddening. How many missing stories are there in these pages? Places where I say there is so much to write, but I don't, and the stories and events get lost in the interim?

She's asked me not to share the details here, but what Cassie's been through in the last two years....there is no word in the English language to express what the pain has carved into her. It doesn't matter what she did to herself and what others did to her. The scars, the burns, what is inside is gouged and clawed.

I left her alone to all of that. I didn't know, this I truly didn't know, but I recognize the empty spaces where things were ripped out. Places that may never be filled again, through no fault of her own, but out of what happened itself.

As a child, you want to know everything. As a teenager, you think you know everything. As an adult, you know there are things that you never want to know.

Sometimes the line between what we do or don't know know blur so fantastically that I can no longer tell the difference.

May Sarton, quoting a writer (Pirandello) who said "One cannot choose what one writes - one can only choose to face it."

Natalie Goldberg, who says "Right now, I am sure I am the only one with the burden of writing. I do not do this for you. I do it so I can shut up the gnawing, dimwitted critics in my brain who tell me I am nothing."

I spoke of art in terms of choice earlier. Ah, the most maddening thing of all the human condition - the moment you think you have it pinned, it shifts. The clouds cradle over the moon, the sun supernovas in front of you, but you know your feet are still on the ground. And at the exact same time you are also spectacularly aware that your feet are spinning on that same ground at 1,000 miles per hour.

I managed to snag an emergency follow up with my primary doctor tomorrow, after having originally had it scheduled 3 weeks out. We gotta do something about these steroids. I love this. I'm worried as hell about this. I don't want to sleep.

We upped my Seroquel to 400 mgs. I'm on Xanax. Five hours of continuous sleep is a miracle. Surely there's a lower dose of steroids. Some combo we can use to reduce this, because the longer it goes, I don't want to stop.

I'm not going to ruin anything. But dear god, does it finally feel good to have the energy to do exactly that if I really, really wanted to.

I know part of it this isn't the mania. I know part of this is that for the first time in over a year, my body is stabilizing and I have real-people energy. I am not fighting the urge to sleep 14 hours a day. My kidneys are working. I'm sick-still-recovering, but my doctors are telling me part of this is normal.

"You're not killing yourself anymore," my kidney doctor said. "That's going to feel good. And I want you to keep up on your mental health, too."

His name is Dr. Max Glazer. Jesse says he's going to become my best friend. I don't know about that. I REALLY wish his name was Max Rager, but that's because I'm in love with the tv show "iZombie", in which the bad guy is named Max Rager.

My tags are such a mess right now.

Probably more babble later. Hypographia - we are in full swing, baby. Oh yeah. I don't know what the hell I'm choosing to face right now and I do this because if I don't, everything else stays dimwitted.

Time to pull out another sidejournal. You know I've had like 3 of those, including daily LJ postings, over the last 7 or so years? All of them with fucking hundreds of pages written in them, concurrent with whatever I put on here? Save yourselves, save myself, words and words and it's not going to stop until it stops.

Better writing than other things, though. I found my drug. The one drug I CAN do. The one drug that doesn't harm me. I can shove the keyboard straight into my arms, layer the cord over the ropey veins, and slam the pressure point as hard it'll go. Indent my skin and bleed something permanent. Something that can be put down, over and over and over again until the scar lines run deeper than tectonic plates.

Words can be erased. They can be burned. They did that. YOU did that, and you know exactly who you are. You know exactly who I'm talking to.

And they're still here, aren't they? My words. I still remember them. I'm still writing them. You did not stop this - and you never could have, even in your most grandiose and pathetic fevered dreams.

At about 16, I found community and acceptance in the New Age movement. The messages of love and compassion against all grievances done, the messages that this body and this life were merely a layover on the great train ride through the Universe, were powerful. If I were truly healed, then I knew I had to be gracious, magnanimous, and sweep aside the actions of abuse in favor of understanding that this life was not entirely real, thus the abuse was not entirely real, either. Pain and suffering were transient. Only love was real. Only love was worth carrying. Forgiveness meant that you had grown above the abuse, because after all, why would you feel negatively about something that wasn't entirely real anyways?

Anger, fear, grief - all of these things only proved that I was somehow blocking the Cosmos, who just wanted to love me, who just wanted me to love those who had hurt me. But while Love can conquer yourself, it cannot move the mountain in someone who refuses to see the stone rise. It turns out that being spiritual does not mean you get to skip all the anger, the confusion, the resentment and work of healing.

I didn't know that. It wasn't until my late 20's that I began to understand that anger and confusion were essential pieces of the puzzle. I couldn't just hold the pretty parts of the picture over the empty space.

Anyone will tell you the background parts of a puzzle are the hardest to properly connect. Backgrounds are full of pieces that look damn near identical, with little or no markings to go by. But without that background, what you have staring back at you is incomplete. A bright thing that has no visual anchor to it. I'd used spirituality as a way of putting together only the middle of the puzzle. I'd used spirituality as a way to avoid all of the painful things that recovery would entail.

My mother found religion at 40. Not the mild-mannered version we'd grown up with, but rather the religion of her husband, who was Mormon. It wasn't the religion itself that I was bothered by. In some strange way, it almost seemed to do her good. She quit smoking. She put her eating disorder behind her. All things considered, I thought, maybe this is where she'll find some peace. And she did. She found her peace. And when she did, it made me furious. I'd assumed that her peace would include reaching out to me. I'd assumed her peace would allow her to open herself wide to me, in which I would grandly grant her my forgiveness.

Hope coupled with egoism is a dangerous combination. I had both running in tidal waves through my veins.

While waiting for the words of release to fall from my mother's lips, I listened to her talk about God's forgiveness. She talked about how cleansing it felt to go to Temple, to confess sin and sorrow alike to God. She talked of the unbearable weight that had been her entire life being lifted.

I eventually realized she would never turn to me for forgiveness. Her guilt belonged to God and God alone. She would never make efforts to repair the relationship between her and I, as she poured every once of her being into a relationship with God.

It took a few more years, but at some point, I was able to give her to her God. Not with any kind of permission or blessing. I just realized that she would always rather face and beg forgiveness to God- an ephemeral, formless, voiceless thing - than ever face me. Asking God for forgiveness is a far less messy prospect than asking the daughter you abused for forgiveness. God will automatically forgive you, all without having to do the slighest damn bit of work to bridge what's been broken.

It was the perfect place for her to hide. She, too, got to avoid any of the sticky, painful work of facing up to and realizing the damage done. Pawn it all off to a being that can never yell at you, can never make you feel bad for what you've done. Toss it all on the shoulders of God and claim it is out of your hands. Talk about how hard you're trying to work for God's forgiveness, all the while ignoring the human being that needs you to try just as hard for their forgiveness.

I used God as a way to deny what the gravity of what was done. She used God in the same way.

I write all of this now because I have a copy of the Book of Mormon. She gave me a copy when she came for my wedding in 2009, with some notes in the front of the book talking about specific verses. I haven't kept the book because I have a burning desire to know more about the Mormon religion. I've kept the book because it was something she wrote in. Something that mattered to her.

I think, in some small and utterly broken way, it's as if I can somehow hold a piece of her that WANTS to be held accountable for what was done. Not held accountable to me, mind you. Never to me. But if she does actually expend that much energy into getting God to forgive her, maybe she understands that there was something bad enough as to require forgiving.

It's not a thing I will ever be able to ask her. It's not a thing I truly want to ask her, either. It would require breaking the near decade of seperation between us and NO answer is worth the trouble that would cause. But it helps me keep the puzzle together inside of myself.

It helps me to keep trying to put together the less-fun parts of the puzzle, because it's the whole picture that makes the effort worth it. The effort is worth it, the picture is worth it. Come hell or high water, the box falling over and the pieces being scattered all across the floor, each piece counts.

I was driving, as I do, listening to the radio, as I do, and commenting on the various memories and associations I have with those songs (as I do.) One of the songs was a song from my youth, one that I had cradled as a champion in my struggle to break free from the abuse at home decades ago.

It was a song about using your anger as a rock to brace yourself against, to leap out from. A song about taking the rage and using it to prove them wrong. It was the "prove them wrong" part that caught my attention.

I make no bones about how precious my anger is to me. My anger is a force that has kept me walking, kept me clawing upwards, inch-by-goddamn-bloody-inch, on the Everest that has been my recovery. I give no apologies for how I've relied on that anger. It has kept me motivated for most of my life, in that very clear "prove them wrong" manner.

But....who am I trying to prove wrong anymore?

My mother, my stepfather, whom I haven't seen nor spoken to in years? David, who has also been exiled from my life? They no longer see the struggles or the triumphs on the big screen that is Teressa's life, because I have completely booted their asses out of the theater.

They remain in my life only in metaphor. These people are ghosts. And how can you prove a ghost wrong?

You can't.

Proving someone wrong only works when that person is able to see what you're doing. But they aren't allowed to see me, because I have long since removed myself from their line of sight. It does no good to hold jousts for an audience that is not there. Dotting my past with bonfires to show just how bright my future is has become nothing more than a constant fire hazard.

My anger, my rage, the burning, seething mess inside of me will not be completely doused. Not now, probably not ever. But maybe I can realize its place - that place being a handhold up instead of a flamethrower aimed behind me.

"When my 16 year old kitty became very ill, the vet mentioned three or four tests we could run. And what would they tell us? Whether she had X, or Y, or Z. And if she has X or Y or Z, what can we do? Nothing that we weren’t doing already.

For me, seeking “closure” would be like ordering all those tests to find out exactly why my kitty was dying, in a vain attempt to “do” something so I could delay the inevitable: sooner or later I was going to have to accept that my kitty was leaving me, and knowing exactly what was happening in her body would not delay her death nor lessen my grief." - BigdogLittlecat

These moments used to bring blood. When I'd finally grown past using red scrawls to paint the pain somewhere outside of me, I would heave things across the room. Use things around me to punch holes into the four walls that contained me. I no longer throw things.

I write. I've always written but now the words are the full force of what rages within. Words are the filter, the voice, the cage, the key.

Too much poetry. Too many years. Yesterday I remembered I am nearly 35 and it all felt so far behind me. Today, having cleared out the last of Cassie's items out of storage, donating all but her children's things and the few folders spilling over with pictures....

I feel so close to the broken thing that they tried to make me.

They. Always "they." I'm so sick of "they". Katherine Elizabeth Malott. James Malott. Name them. Fuck the public sphere. They tried to break me. They tried to break Cassie. Maybe they did break Cassie, if what I pulled out of her storage unit is any indication. They did not break me.

That's me. That's a baby picture of me - or it would be, had my face not been burned out of the picture. Better than burning the effigy of my journals , why not just burn the face of the very small being that brought your ruin? That tiny, pudgy little thing that brought down the castle walls with claymores and trumpets?

Cassie didn't burn the picture. At least I don't think she did. She's a memory junkie like me. And if she did? Some part of me can forgive her in a way I could never forgive them. But it wasn't her.

There are other pictures. My mother, young, early 20's, long before the woman who blamed me and my pre-teen sister for seducing our stepfather, for tempting him into raping us, took up residence in her faulty bones.

Or maybe that woman was there all along.

It used to matter. It doesn't matter anymore. I no longer care what made the difference, what changed, where it changed, or why it changed. One of the benefits of years of therapy is that the why's begin mattering far, far less than the turns of the events themselves.

There are pictures of Cassie, 8, 9, 10 years old. I know now that Jim had began abusing her at 9. It's like looking at the past but with a legend this time, with a map that marks where it all started to go wrong. Continent sized, red and blaring warning signals, blinking and screaming through the decades....sounds that we only now can hear. As if Time and History were things pried apart by galaxies and the knowledge of the past has only now reached us, light years later.

I thought to myself that for someone who says she does not need a family, I sure wound up with a ton of their shit. I then thought "Why the hell would ANYONE need a family?"

I still do not know the answer to that. I don't think I want to know. The answer could not possibly be worth the pain. No answer on Earth could be worth what I'd have to drag myself through to understand it.

As it always goes, the pain shudders with anger and wild, swinging impotence. There is never anything to aim this at, save a world I fill with words. There is no closure. There is no end to this. There never will be. All I will ever have is what I have now, stuffing paragraphs like bandages into desperately wanting wounds. A forever unfufilled need to believe that the pain doesn't matter and a sorrow that I will cradle to my dying breath.

That and a martyr complex that mocks me just as loudly as the knocking mess that beats beneath this ribcage.

We all know customers are stupid. Some of you here on my list came from CustomersSuck.Com, so we are all well aware of this. However, I have come upon what may be the stupidest customer I've ever encountered.

Dude receives his printed bill which takes him to the 4th of this month.

Dude is confused as to why his purchase, made on the 17th of this month, did not appear on his printed bill. The one we printed to end on the 4th.

Jesse's suggestion: Sir, our technology has not yet advanced as to where immediate purchases will magically reprint themselves on the paper in your hand.

I dunno.

Nothing of major to report. A meandering yammer session I had with Jesse about the horrid-ness that is my mother, and he asked what I would do if they got better.

"Absolutely nothing," was my response. It'd be too little, too late, and they will never be safe to let back in. I told Jesse that if they ever DO get better, they will recognize the severity of what they did to me. From that, they will recognize my right to never speak to them again.

I had to come to that realization with a few people I screwed over in my using days. I have no right to push for anything they don't feel like giving - be it forgiveness, my presence in their life, or the chance to make amends.

Step 9: Make amends when at all possible, except when to do so when injure them or others.

And them attempting to reach me, no matter how heartfelt their pleas might ring out, would be injurious. If they ever get better, they will understand this.

They won't ever get better. And I have no interest should they ever do get better.

Stupid dream about my stepfather and mother, in which we were all (of course) in an isolated cabin miles and miles away from anyone else. He kept getting closer, my mother kept telling me I wouldn't be able to get away. I hissed at him, telling him to not touch me. He did anyways. My mother was threatening to call the police (because not wanting to be touched is apparently an arrest-able offense?)

I jumped on my stepfather, trying to beat him up. The idea was that if he was bloody enough by the time the cops got there, they'd arrest me and take me away. They'd take me away from my mother and stepfather. No matter how hard I hit him, he didn't bleed.

He just laughed.

The cops never showed up. I tore out of the house into the snow covered yard. It was full of dead branches and rusted cars and my feet were cut open and I couldn't run any further. They caught up to me.

It's 11 AM. I've been awake for about 29 hours now. I'm pretty sure I'll be awake for at least another four. What gives, you say? Maybe too much sex last night. Too much INCREEEDIBLE SEEEXX! Maybe too much coffee last night. Too much SUGGARRR IN COFFEE. Which did, actually, taste pretty damn incredible.

I think my body begs to differ, though.

Also, it's been a while since I've had a night of straight through-the-hours insomnia. I suppose it's time. The seroquel has solved that problem 99% of the time. I guess this is the 1% of the time it doesn't put me on my ass in bed. Thank god for my current unemployment, which will let me crash solid here in a few hours.

At least I hope. I don't want to take any sedatives or drugs that have sedative properties (Benadryl, Nyquil in the middle of the day. That may yet be what needs to be done. I suppose we'll see.

I'm hearing music that is not there. This happens when I get very tired. It's usually prompted by white noise. I used to think this was a sure sign of schizophrenia. But it turns out that this phenomenon is not terribly uncommon. The human brain will attempt to make patterns out of noises that have no pattern. I was relieved to learn that.

It's usually split 50/50 between heavy metal and classical music. Today it sounds sorta top 40 pop-punk. Not bad. It never hits country, thank god. Sometimes the classical pieces are so beautiful that I wished I could read music, write it down. But deaf tone I am as well as musically notated-less.

That didn't make much sense. Oh well.

It's funny - funny sad - to note that Audrey and Julien were both removed from their mother twice. I was removed from MY mother twice, too. (The state had yanked me out at 15, put me back at 16, and I ran away at 17).

I don't know why the state did not remove my sister or my kid brother until I ran away and rang the alarms the second time at 17. And even then, they only took my sister away, leaving my kid brother at the age of 6 or 7 at home, free to be abused until he moved out at 18.

I think Arizona had made some budget cuts to social services that year. Must have been pretty deep and nasty cuts, too. What's a few million dollars over saving a little kid from getting his jaw knocked in with a rifle butt as a punishment? What's a little snip here and there from the welfare system going to do? Certainly it won't lead to a teenage boy who is pulling his father off his mother, who had her pinned to the ground with a knife at her throat.

No. Never. /sarcasm

The state was good to me.

They failed him. I carry anger for that. They also failed Cassie by not taking her away when I was removed the first time. Those two years could have been pivotal in allowing her to break free from their immediate grasp. Who knows what ripple effects that might have had on her health, her sanity, her children NOW....

Shoulda coulda woulda. Did they fail by putting me back at 16? I don't know. I thought things were better. I wanted to go home. Was very NERVOUS, mind you, but at 16, you can believe even the most transparent of lies.

And I was definitely 16.

Maybe it's just being terribly loopy, but I'm having to stop myself from FB'ing a message to my kid brother. Every time I try, it sits silently. No reply. I don't blame him for that. He doesn't know me and what he does know has come from the lips of my abusers. Well, and Cassie, who is probably technically an abuser (of me, because she's TOTALLY CONFIRMED as an abuser to HER KIDS).

I waited for Jimmie to turn 18 before I sent any message at all. I told myself I was being smart, noble, waiting for a time when he would be able to pull away from our mother, his father. I now sorta wonder if that was the wrong move. But time doesn't roll backwards. If it was a mistake then, it's not one I can correct.

He, like Cassie, is still involved with them. That used to make me nervous about contacting him, as if I'd be somehow inviting them as well.

I know better now. Fuck 'dem bitches. Like He-Man, I HAVE THE POWER (of Keeping Their Fucking Horrorshow Out Of My Life No Matter WHO I Talk To).

In 1995, my stepbrother lost his mother, his best friend, and his pregnant girlfriend inside three consecutive months. It changed him forever. It also changed us as a family forever, as he was living at home and we were close to all three of these people.

I was 13, Cassie only 11. Shell-shocked as we all were, my mother and stepfather just....stopped. They holed up in their room, emptying entire bottles of Percocet down their throats. This is when the worst of the neglect and then further active abuse began.

This is when I began to spiral. This is when Cassie stepped up to them and began to hold them together.

I was 33 years old before I knew that my stepfather sexually abused her. He'd gotten to her at 9 years old - years before his hand had reached me. Years before I had any clue that his hand even could reach her. I could not comprehend why she, at 11, would cook for them, would encourage them to bathe, would feed and change their newborn son. It continued for years.

It still continues, though conflicted as she is about it these days. The 32 year old woman she is now still tries to hold them together. I did not understand. I STILL do not understand.

But I do know why. I may not understand, but I do know. She didn't know any other way. They had made sure of that.

Without the journals from those years, my memories rely on on stilted moments, moments of visual clarity. There are so few - far fewer than I would like. The seeping line of red that welled out of the first cut I ever made on my skin. Twisting and turning uncomfortably in the bathtub. The showerhead had broken. Taking a bath meant spending more time naked in the house than I felt safe with. I nearly stopping bathing entirely.

Moments few, feelings overwhelming. I want to remember more. I have to remember more.

This is where I need Cassie. This is where the empty spaces would fill in. As young as she was, surely she would still remember other moments from that time. Arguments, dinners, family outings, SOMETHING. Something other than blood and fear.

....except I'm certain that that is what she remembers, too. She was younger than I and definably more abused by then - her memories are bound to be even more wavering and uncertain than mine. But I want the chance to find out.

God, I want that chance so badly. I. Cannot. Have. It. Not so long as she is insistent on killing herself in degrees and leaps. Not so long as her madness continues to inflict pain on her own children, both now the age when their grandparents began the worst of abuse on their mother.

I need these memories corroborated. I need someone to fill in the gaps. I don't think I'll ever get that. And maybe that's a good thing. Maybe that's a blessing. Maybe the heartbreak of remembering the suffering in full would crush me.

I do not think it would. But I'd like the chance to find out.

I wish Cassie were safe to call about these things. I really, really, wish she was.

A headache pushes me out of bed. I'd be more annoyed, except that's a regular, normal occurrence - or at least is normal in normal times. So in a way, it's almost comforting. I haven't languished in bed for hours, dreading the full opening of my eyes. My body went "Fuck you, bitch, ya gettin' up."

And Cholula, thank you so much! Not only is your gift needed, but it was an amazing morale boost. It's so easy to get nearly stuck in spinning around. Your kindness breaks that wheel and it is much, much appreciated. Especially as I'd woken up from a nightmare. A creepy, gross one in which I'd been having a consensual relationship with my stepfather. In the dream, I was just begining to get the idea that this wasn't right, but my family around me kept going on about how wonderful he was for me.

So, in essence, pretty close to real life - at least as far as "consensual" at 14 meant "power imbalances and grooming techniques that I hadn't yet recognized". I can't remember if I left him in the dream or if I stayed. I DO know that in real life, I left. It just drives me insane that there might be even the TINIEST bit of guilt for that, 20 years later.

Well, at least I don't have to listen to any jokes about it being cheating. Yeah, David took the oppurtunity once, when I'd had a similar dream, and I was sharing about it, to crack a joke about "Should I be worried you're going to cheat on me?" He smiled and laughed, quite pleased with his wit. Never mind the fact that I was scowling, trembling, had a voice cracking with shame. Never mind the fact that I had just spent five minutes telling him - IN DIRECT WORDS - how disgusting the dream made me feel, how awful it made me feel, how dirty it made me feel.

Nope, never mind any of that. David wanted to be funny and make a joke out of my childhood rape.

I was less than pleased and snapped at him that it wasn't funny. Falling back on one of his favorite excuses, he went "It's just a joke!"

**I** snapped back "Find something other than childhood sexual abuse to joke about!"

He did not apologize.

After my initial fury passed, I made some excuse that he'd never had a girlfriend who was so open about her sexual abuse and thus he didn't know how to appropriately handle it. It didn't occur to me until three months after the breakup that a freaking teenager would know not to make that joke. That was not the first time he'd cracked "jokes" like that about my history. That was not the last time he cracked "jokes" like that about my history.

So often, SO often, he tried couching those cruel things he said into "jokes." A coverup for a variety of hurtful, outlandish, and just outright mean words aimed towards me. It's like, I can get behind the idea of accidently letting loose with an extremely ill-timed, ill-mannered joke once in a while. I'm guilty of that. Often, even. I can be a tremendously thoughtless asshole. But a good person, when it comes out that the joke was hurtful, apologizes and then stays the fuck away from joking about that hurtful subject.

He rarely apologized and NEVER stopped joking about those sorts of things.

I don't know if he really thought he was funny or if he was intentionally trying to be an asshole. Knowing him and his overinflated sense of confidence in his wit, he most likely thought he was being brilliant. His intent doesn't really matter, though. It was a dick move regardless. I know that now.

So between that memory with David, the dream itself, and the headache, Cholula - your message with your gift helped me shake off the icky this morning. THANK YOU. Thank you. It is good to know I have friends, reaching out with words and love. THANK YOU.